About “House of the Rising Sun”

The May 2017 issue of Q Magazine described this song as a cover and mentioned that it features contributions from twenty classical guitarists. Before the song became available alt-J hid a YouTube link to The Animals' well-known version of the folk song in their website’s exploration game but in an interview with Philadelphia’s Radio 104.5 keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton described the song as “not a cover of The Animals” but rather “sort of our version of the folk song”. In a later interview, he added that the second verse and chorus of their version are original and that “it’s an original piece of work and not just chucking in a cover to fill space as it were”.

What have the artists said about the song?

We have always seen ourselves as a bit of a folk band, and so it seems fitting to try our hands at a song like this. No one knows for sure where this song originated, but our version is very much set in New Orleans. The first verse is mostly from the folk song, the second is our own, thus continuing the folk process of taking a song, changing it, and passing it on.

Ari Shapiro: I hope it doesn’t sound rude, but I think one of my favorite tracks on this album is actually your cover of “House of the Rising Sun.”

Joe Newman: No, I think that’s great. We are a folk band and we’ve taken a very old folk song and we’ve kind of reimagined it.

Ari Shapiro: There are lyrics I’ve never heard before and I didn’t know if they were lyrics from an early version of the song that I just wasn’t familiar with, or if you’d written them yourself. But this line, “Like a bird flying over a forest fire, my father feels the heat beneath his wings.” That just stopped me dead.

Gus Unger-Hamilton: That’s original, original stuff. Joe wrote a second verse for it, and the first verse of our version is based on Woody Guthrie’s version. And then there’s the chorus which we wrote, and the second verse. So it’s more original material than cover really, this song.